God’s Design for Sexuality
In this episode, Bill Hendricks, Juli Slattery, and Joy Skarka discuss authentic intimacy, focusing on God’s design for sexuality.
Timecodes
- 01:04
- Introduction to Slattery and Sharka
- 03:58
- How has the church addressed sexuality in the conext of discipleship?
- 10:30
- How can talking about our sexuality keep us from sexual sin?
- 13:35
- How can we have hard conversations about sexuality without shame?
- 17:53
- How would you advise a spiritual leader struggling with sexual brokenness and pornography?
- 22:19
- Why does sex have such a powerful impact?
- 37:32
- How does what we believe about sex reveal what we believe about God?
- 43:50
- How is your organization more about healing and restoring a person’s soul?
Transcript
Voiceover:
Welcome to The Table Podcast, where we discuss issues of God and culture, brought to you by Dallas Theological Seminary.
Bill Hendricks:
Hello, welcome to The Table Podcast, where we discuss issues of God and culture. My name is Bill Hendricks. I'm the Executive Director for Christian Leadership at the Hendrick Center, and I want to welcome you today. Today we're going to talk about a fairly personal and intimate issue, our sexuality. We're going to look at sexuality from a biblical perspective by inviting two experts in this field who have an organization called Authentic Intimacy. I want to welcome Dr. Juli Slattery, who is the Founder and President of Authentic Intimacy, and she's a clinical psychologist, and her colleague, Dr. Joy Skarka, who is Director of Discipleship for AI. I might point out, is also a Dallas Seminary grad. Ladies, welcome to The Table Podcast.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
Thanks for having us. We're thrilled to be here.
Dr. Joy Skarka:
Thank you, Bill. I'm excited to do this again with you.
Bill Hendricks:
Well, welcome back. I got to tell you, you fill me with interest as I pondered this subject and looked over the resources that you've developed on it. Your vision, you said on your website, boils down to two words, sexual discipleship. That's a new term for me. I've not heard that one before. I certainly believe in the concept of discipleship. And in fact, I believe that discipleship is whole life discipleship. It extends to every area of life, which of course includes our sexuality, but never really talked about sexual discipleship. Maybe a good place to start, Juli, you're a co-founder with Linda Dillow of Authentic Intimacy. Tell us even how this came about in your story. What led you to develop this organization?
Dr. Juli Slattery:
I'd love to share that. Bill, I was working in marriage and family type ministry as a psychologist since the time I got out of school. Just a real heart for women and for marriage and family issues as a clinician. And then I spent four years working at Focus on the Family in that capacity. And during my four years at Focus on the Family, the Lord just began to take me on a very personal journey of pursuing his heart. During that season, he just laid on my heart this burden for sexual brokenness, particularly sexual brokenness among Christian women that wasn't being given a voice. I felt like the church at best was sort of dropping care packages of information without really giving in the trenches of what women were struggling with.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
And so I had written on sexuality in the past in relation to marriage and spoken on it. But at this point I really just felt like the Lord was asking me to sort of do a deep dive and to start creating resources that would be helpful for women. That was about 10 years ago. And since that time, the ministry has really grown and morphed into not just a women's ministry but really an all church ministry. So we also do a lot of training with Christian leaders on how do you approach sexuality with more of a discipleship and gospel focus instead of it being more a problem issue that we're just trying to get rid of. So that's kind of the heart behind it and it certainly has been a faith walk ever since the Lord called me to it.
Bill Hendricks:
I can only imagine. And I'm sure that you over the years have run into plenty of people, particularly in our culture, who they would say, well, frankly, the church is the problem of why sexuality is so problematic for people. How do you respond to that?
Dr. Juli Slattery:
Well, I would say the church isn't the reason it's so problematic, but I'd also say that the church hasn't done a great job historically of helping us navigate these issues. So while as God's people we have his truth related to every area of life, including sexuality, some of the ways that we've addressed or not addressed sexual issues has added to this shame to which people are feeling stuck. You mentioned that term sexual discipleship, it's a term that I started thinking about probably about five years into the journey. I recognized in working with so many Christians on this topic that we essentially had been sexually discipled by the culture and at best the church had been giving information on what should you think about sex before marriage or what should you think about having a gay identity.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
But we weren't training people in how to think biblically about their sexuality and how to walk that out in the trenches of life. And so, although it's an odd pairing of words, I think it really focuses on how we need to change the approach to sexual issues in our day and age with more of a discipleship mentality coming out of our commitment to Christ rather than it being more of a separated or segmented category that we're trying to fix or we're trying to figure out. So it's, again, a journey that's been evolving for us as a ministry.
Bill Hendricks:
Yeah. Joy, let me direct this question to you. You're the Director of Discipleship there at Authentic Intimacy. And so let's work with this term, sexual discipleship. I don't know, maybe this isn't the right way to put it, but can you give us a crash course, a 101 on where does the understanding of sexual discipleship begin and where does it take us?
Dr. Joy Skarka:
Thanks, Bill. What we have discovered is so much of this starts with ourselves and working through our own sexual issues and realizing that we're all sexually broken and how do we follow God with our sexuality? And so we actually have a membership platform where hundreds of Christian leaders, we have pastors, teachers, lay leaders, small group leaders, are all joining us and processing through their own sexual discipleship so that then they can have a better understanding foundation so that they can begin discipling those around them.
Dr. Joy Skarka:
And so that looks like practically is we have different online groups, we call them cohorts or online book studies, where people are studying God's word, what does it say about sexuality and how can we apply this to our ministries? And it has been powerful to see some of these Christian leaders who for the first time are acknowledging their own issues, their own brokenness. In fact, in one group, we had a woman, she has been serving in ministry for 20 plus years and she said that was the first time she had ever said the word masturbation out loud. And so just things like this happen in our groups all the time where people have these little glimpses of freedom and then are able to then go help the people in their churches.
Bill Hendricks:
I understand or assume that people can get more information about those groups at your website, authenticintimacy.com. Is that correct?
Dr. Joy Skarka:
Yeah. We have two different websites. We have authenticintimacy.com, and we talk about that as resources for the average person trying to understand God's design for sexuality. And then we have a second website called sexualdiscipleship.com. And this is our leader platform with e-courses, training videos, podcasts, resources to help Christian leaders understand how to navigate this conversation like we're having today.
Bill Hendricks:
That's outstanding. So you mentioned the particular woman who struggled even to articulate sexual terms and so forth, like that was a new thing for her. And in doing so you sort of raised the curtain a little bit on this huge, massive issue of shame that many people feel around sexuality. And in fact, you yourself in your dissertation talked with over 1,000 women, interviewed 1,000 women about this very issue of shame. I'd love for you to share more about that with our listeners and what you discovered in that process.
Dr. Joy Skarka:
It was such a powerful project. I surveyed and interviewed over 1,000 women and got to hear their stories of how they experienced sexual shame. And so it was a lot of stories of conversations that they had in church culture and from relationships, different addictions, different abusive situations. It all boiled down to this feeling of something being so wrong with these women that they thought no one would love them, that God wouldn't even love them, that they couldn't be forgiven. And so it caused some of these women to walk away from church, their faith, and to kind of hide. So relationally, it caused a lot of damage.
Dr. Joy Skarka:
And so what I saw, so I got to hear all these stories, but then we got to talk about the hope that how Jesus had set so many of these women free from the sexual shame they experienced. And so one of the big pieces of this was understanding God's design for sexuality. So many of the women said they didn't know that it was okay to have sexual desire and curiosities and questions, but how to steward that, how to live out sexual integrity. And so being able to understand that that's kind of what we're so passionate about in our ministry is to help people process this. That this is okay and good to have, God created us as sexual beings, but how do we steward it not just in singleness but also in marriage.
Bill Hendricks:
Juli, I love the idea that you all are working with leaders and through that able to get to sort of everyday Christians, which is exactly what needs to happen. What do you do with the criticism that I know some probably are thinking, well, man, if we start talking about these issues with our people, that's going to lead to no good. I mean, if nothing else, it's going to tempt people to go places they shouldn't go just because they're thinking about sex too much. How do you deal with that?
Dr. Juli Slattery:
Yeah, that is like sort of an empty question in some ways because we know that in every church, in every organization, in every family, these issues are represented. People are struggling with pornography and sexual addiction. They're struggling with the fallout of sexual trauma from their past, both men and women. We know that marriages are struggling to understand what does sexual wholeness even look like and how do we overcome the barriers that we run into? We know Christian singles are wrestling with, why am I sexual in the first place? And then of course the issues that are coming up more in our day and age with gender confusion and same sex attraction and how do we navigate this in our own lives and families but also as we interact with a culture that has a very different perspective on sexuality.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
It used to be, Bill, that when we would go to a church, they would raise that objection of, well, we don't struggle with those things, we don't want to introduce this conversation. But I would say within the last five years or so, we have the churches coming to us saying, "We realize that not only do we need to have this conversation, but we don't even know where to start." Unfortunately, we really have adopted this heritage of we don't talk about these things. I know we sometimes even would quote your father, Bill, and say, I think he put it, "We shouldn't be ashamed to talk about what God wasn't ashamed to create." And he really was one of the pioneers in just even challenging the church to have hard conversations.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
But nowadays we hardly meet a Christian leader who isn't fully aware of the fact that not only is this an issue, it is perhaps the most pressing issue causing Christians to deconstruct from our faith in God, causing them to question his goodness. And so most Christian leaders we find are very ready to have this conversation and eager to have it in a way that is both ground in a biblical truth and also compassionate, related to the real pain and issues people are walking through.
Bill Hendricks:
Well, you're right. There is a cone of silence for many churches and Christian groups around it. Let's press into having the conversation. How do you siphon the shame off? I know that doesn't happen immediately. How would a congregation, a small group, a group of Christians who want to get serious about sexual discipleship, begin to talk and have conversations that are of a sexual nature when certainly from the very beginning, many of them are like, man, I'm really feeling uncomfortable. I don't know if I want to go there. For some, as has been pointed out, it's literally re-traumatizing them from things that have happened to them in the past. So as a psychologist, what's your approach?
Dr. Juli Slattery:
Yeah. First of all, you're absolutely right that it's not just that we talk about sexuality but how we talk about it. Talking about it with reverence and with dignity and with sensitivity to know that there are real triggers there. And so typically I will begin by even just talking about how we think about sexual issues. I think one of the mistakes that we make in churches is we go after the specific issues or symptoms or problems. So you might hear a sermon series on LGBT issues or a sermon series on pornography, and it makes people feel called out, it makes them feel shame, and it makes them feel like they're the only ones that may have a struggle.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
And so we really encourage organizations to talk first holistically about why did God create sex in the first place? What's the purpose of our sexuality? What are the counterfeit narratives that we've grown up believing, whether they're narratives that come from the culture or more legalistic understanding of sexuality? And then why is sex such a spiritual battleground? Why does the enemy want to defeat it so much? Why is it so tied into our identity? And so we really encourage churches to begin with that conversation and then start walking out of that with a phrase that we use all the time that Joy already mentioned, we are all sexually broken. I think this really helps, again, connect our sexuality even to the gospel message that none of us are righteous even if our actions have been "pure". We have hearts that want to really defile and misuse every good gift that God has given, including sexuality.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
And so when we lay that groundwork and we let people know, hey, we're all on a trajectory towards integrity, towards asking God to reclaim this area of our lives, it really does open a conversation where people begin to feel safe asking their more specific questions.
Dr. Joy Skarka:
And can I speak to that too, Bill?
Bill Hendricks:
Yes, absolutely.
Dr. Joy Skarka:
I think something that Juli does really well in our ministry and as she's at these speaking events is she really leads with humility. And so when we say we're all sexually broken, she shows it too. Like she'll share some stories from her life or she'll have people come up and share testimonies of how we have experienced maybe someone who's struggled with pornography and found freedom or is still struggling with an issue in their marriage. So really showing other people's stories that aren't all wrapped up in a bow helps people realize, hey, we're all on the sanctification journey to become more like Christ and we're here to partner in that with you to walk on this journey. It is powerful after some of our events or our groups, people line up to talk to us, to share. They want to share their story because they feel so safe and seen. And so we really encourage our leaders to create these safe environments so that in a small group setting, people can feel that safety to share their stories and begin that freedom-filling journey.
Bill Hendricks:
Well, I was going to ask, I feel certain that we have listeners that are struggling say with pornography and they're leaders in a church, they're pastors or youth leaders or whoever. They're thinking, man, I'd love to be able to open up about this and begin to deal with this and have tried different times. But boy, if I sort of outed myself and the leaders, the elders or whoever, found out about this, I mean, they'd show me the door like yesterday. So how would you advise, what would be your recommendation to somebody who wants to come to grips with a brokenness there and a habit that they know is killing them but at the same time they feel desperate, like I don't know how to get out of this without some serious repercussions professionally.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
Yeah. Joy, do you want to share a little bit about your testimony first and then maybe I can respond to just church culture and environment and how we need to change that?
Dr. Joy Skarka:
Yeah. This is a part of my story, Bill. I was a freshman in college. I had just walked through a sexual trauma as a freshman in college and had no sex education and so I turned to pornography to try and find answers to what had happened to me and it quickly became my coping mechanism. And so here I was, also a new believer in Christ leading small groups for college ministry trying to figure all this out. And it really took another woman to go first and to share her story of how she struggled and how she found freedom for me to feel comfortable to share my story.
Dr. Joy Skarka:
And so a lot of what I challenge different church leaders to do is to have other women begin having conversations so this is an acceptable thing to talk about, but also creating this safety of, hey, if you come forward and share that you're struggling with pornography and say you're a small group leader for a church or you're a youth pastor, we have something in place to help you so that there is that safety of, okay, you're not going to get fired on the spot for coming forward and sharing that.
Dr. Joy Skarka:
I know Juli and I are going to talk into that some more, but for example, at my church, we've created this sort of small group where, hey, if you're a woman that has come forward, we're going to provide this safe place with other women who are trained leaders and who maybe have gone through a similar struggle that can help you process through your story and begin finding healing.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
Yeah. I'd love to speak into that in terms of church culture. That's actually something that we found that so needs to be addressed and changed because we really do have this environment where not only are you not allowed to sin, you're also not allowed to struggle. There's the assumption that if you're a spiritual leader and you're reading your Bible, you won't be struggling with anything sexual. And it really does create this atmosphere where leaders feel like I have nowhere to go. Like if I even admit that my marriage is struggling or that I'm struggling with a certain sexual temptation, I may lose my job.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
And so we do a lot of work, again, just with leadership teams in terms of how do you change that culture and that environment where we actually get back to what's more biblical, that we're all on a journey of maturity, we're all on a journey of surrender, we all face temptations, and really help a team or even a ministry realize that what we really want is people with so much integrity that when they begin to struggle, they come forward with that. That's a more mature Christian than somebody that feels like they have to be double faced, they have to keep their sin secret and then they present the image of a leader on the outside.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
And that will take a culture change. We see that happening in some of the organizations that we work with. For example, even the questions that you ask on an application or in an interview process is the question, do you struggle with pornography or another sexual sin? That's the current question. But asking a question instead, something like, how has sexual struggle played into your spiritual journey and what kind of accountability or resources are you currently involved in in just surrendering that area to God?
Dr. Juli Slattery:
So it begins with the assumption that you are going to struggle, it's normal to struggle. And particularly for Christian leaders, this is an area that the enemy will come after. And if we're not actively engaging in maturity and discipleship and accountability, we really set ourselves up for kind of that battle by ourselves that we're probably destined at some point to lose.
Bill Hendricks:
I have to ask both at a sort of psychological level and a spiritual level. It does seem that sexuality has such a powerful impact, and if I can say the word, hold on people. There's something about that experience of life that is very, very gripping. Why is that and what do we do about that?
Dr. Juli Slattery:
Yeah. I think the power that it has in our lives even speaks to the significance with which God created it. And so we talk a lot at Authentic Intimacy about how our sexuality is actually a living metaphor of our need for covenant relationship and God's covenant love for us. When we read the scripture from cover to cover, which I know most Dallas grads, all Dallas grads I'm sure have done, you see that sexuality is most often referenced in the position of being a metaphor. For example, the Old Testament prophets all the sexual language that is metaphorical of the covenant, the love relationship with God and his people and his call to faithfulness, his holy jealousy.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
And so we really believe that when you press into that metaphor, you can never separate sexuality from the spiritual and relational significance with which it was created. Our culture keeps trying to section it off, say there's hookups, there's friends with benefits, this won't hurt you, but you never can do that. And so sexual sin as 1st Corinthians 6 says is a sin against your own body. There's something very spiritual in the component of how our sexuality integrates with our bodies being the temple of the Holy Spirit. And so there's a mystery to that, but everything we see in research and in our just normal everyday experience would say sexuality is one of the most profound aspects of how God created us in his image for intimacy to be known and to be in relationship with him and here on planet earth. So that would be how I'd say that. Joy, would you want to add to that?
Dr. Joy Skarka:
I think I would just add in that our world, our culture is just trying to meet those legitimate needs in illegitimate ways. Juli, you talk about this a lot, and I think it's so helpful in that God created us as sexual beings. But when we are turning to pornography or something else to meet those needs, it's really not how God created it and I think that's why we see this confusion in our culture or, well, hookup after hookup is never enough because of that. We're not satisfying that real need we have to be known and to be loved, which only God can fill.
Bill Hendricks:
Well, and that links up with, again, the interviews that you did, but I also think that a lot of the power of sin lies in when it's a secrecy. People, out of that shame, they cloak and try to hide what is actually true about them that they're ashamed of and that makes it much worse and it has a certain hold on them. The silence in and of itself can begin to break them down. You described to me the joy, the sense of freedom that women had found once they were able to talk about things either that they had chosen to do or things that had been done to them.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
Yeah, that's so true. Part of the enemy's strategy, particularly related to sexuality, is to keep us hidden and in shame. I think even when we look at 1st John chapter one, it talks about the difference between walking in light and walking in darkness. Sexual shame and sexual secrets and temptations often have so much hold on our lives because we don't speak them out loud. That's not the final cure all but it certainly is the first step for many, many people to come out of the light and be able to speak these things out loud.
Bill Hendricks:
And then… I'm sorry, go ahead, Joy.
Dr. Joy Skarka:
I was just going to add to that that one of the most surprising things that came out of my research was the high percentage of women who, because of the sexual shame they experienced, doubted their salvation. They just believed they were so far gone that God could never love and forgive and redeem them. And it makes me just think of the Genesis creation story where after Adam and Eve sin, they're hiding from God. They experience sexual shame. They realize they're naked. They hide in a bush. What does God do? I mean, God comes into the story and he calls them back into a relationship with them. He says, "Where are you?" He's calling them back. And so I just encourage all of the women that I've ministered to that nothing that you've done or has been done to you would ever be too far gone for God to love you and redeem you and forgive you. And so I think that message would break a lot of women free from this shame that they're experiencing.
Bill Hendricks:
If you don't mind, I was going to ask you if there was a particular story, obviously not getting into people's names and revealing their identities, but if there was a person that you had run into in the course of your work along the way who was a perfect illustration of what you just said.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
Yeah. Would you like me to share one, Joy?
Dr. Joy Skarka:
Sure.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
We probably both have like a role deck, maybe we could each share one. I'm thinking of somebody that is involved with our ministry who actually was on the mission field and loved Jesus but struggled with same sex attraction and actually left the mission field, left her mission because of that struggle. She just couldn't reconcile it, and her faith started to deconstruct. And then somehow she found our ministry and got plugged into our resources, started going through some of our online Bible studies and has been doing that over the course of the last year and a half and really begun to reconcile her relationship with God, with her particular struggle, understand God's design for sexuality but also understand that God still loves her and wants to use her and that she doesn't have to be ashamed of her struggle.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
And so she's now at a place where she's leading groups and is so on fire not just for the Lord in terms of the mission work but also helping people understand how God is the redeemer of all things. That's somebody that I just spoke with this morning. So she's top of mind for me, but representative of just so many women but also men and couples that we've seen that have just really been changed because they began hearing God's truth on sexuality with a realistic and loving perspective. What's one that comes to mind for you, Joy?
Dr. Joy Skarka:
I was just thinking about, so we've been doing online book studies, these small groups that I've mentioned, the last two years and we found out today that over 600 people have gone through these groups. And so just thinking about, wow, 600 people that have experienced being able to, for some of them the first time being able to talk about these things in a safe environment. I think that's just a powerful number of life change. And then how many, we've had close to 100 leaders come out of that too. So there is a lot of multiplication happening here, a lot of discipleship at work in our ministry.
Bill Hendricks:
When you mentioned the mission field, Juli, it reminded me of something that I read that you all talk about when you say talking about sexuality is a necessary part of the great commission. That's a new one for, I think, many of us to hear. Talk to us more about that. Where does the Great Commission and sexuality come together?
Dr. Juli Slattery:
Yeah. Boy, I see it intersecting so much. If we break the great commission down, it's really these activities of evangelism, of sharing Christ love, and then teaching people to walk in the way that Jesus calls us to, that discipleship component. And so when we talk about sharing the love of Christ with people, we just even look at how many people are turned off to the gospel because of sexual issues. When I talk to apologists or evangelists today, they will tell me the number one category of objections is about being gay or about transgender or about sexual abuse. Like loving God would not behave this way or have these kinds of standards.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
And so that actually is a roadblock to most people that you're sharing that gospel with, particularly in the Western world. If you can't be equipped in addressing that issue, you're going to lose people. But then we also look at, for example, in John chapter four, Jesus is ministering to the woman at the well. John Piper said, in reference to that passage, that Jesus knew the quickest way to the heart was through a wound and that's why he brought up her sexual shame because that was the greatest wound in her life. The same is really true for a lot of people that we are reaching for the gospel. The greatest wound in their life is their divorce or an infidelity or their sexual addiction or their broken gender identity. If we can't step into that conversation with comfort and with knowledge and with a biblical perspective that goes beyond just quoting a Bible verse, then we won't reach them with the living water that Jesus is.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
And so that is the evangelism component, but then the discipleship component. Again, when we look at the research, we see what percentage of confessing Christians believe that it's okay to cohabit instead of get married, or we look at the percentage of professing Christians that are struggling with pornography or who their greatest issue in marriage is around sexuality, like don't know how to love their gay son or daughter. This is the discipleship issue of our day and age. And so I really have come to believe that it's essential for not just those of us who are kind of doing this work full-time and to have a biblical grasp of this, but we also need to equip every believer in how to engage in these issues because of the gospel and discipleship that are at stake.
Bill Hendricks:
Well, am I correct that for many people, the engagement in sexual immoralities, if we call it that, and sexual addictions and so forth, is less driven by the sex itself but by much deeper needs and wounds and brokenness and places that need healing in their soul and the sexual activity is basically an attempt to escape that pain and narcotize it with dopamine.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
Yeah. Boy, you know something about this, don't you, Bill? That's a good way to put it, and you're absolutely right, and this is why the traditional church approaches of just pray harder, memorize this verse, just stop doing this don't work because with most of us, our sexual temptation is coming out of wounds, coming out of pain, loneliness, depression, trauma from the past. And if we don't invite God into those wounds, we really will feel like we're losing a battle of willpower. And so when we say God wants to reclaim the sexual area of your heart, it's not changing your behavior primarily, it's truly changing your identity so that your behavior becomes a new outflow, the fruit of that. Joy, would you want to add to that?
Dr. Joy Skarka:
Yes. I think we see that too as people are working through their sexual issues, that there's always a root or a deeper issue there. And so even to ask good questions to help that person try and figure out what that is, another word for it is trigger. So what is triggering someone to turn to something to cope, to numb with that pain? And I think to break free from a lot of these issues is to find those root issues, what's triggering you, and to start in that. Yeah, start there.
Bill Hendricks:
Well, Joy knows that at the Hendricks Center, we have a program, a leadership development process we call Lead, which is a five day intensive program for say a couple or a single person to come through and over five days to meet with four different kinds of coaches, a personal and if they're married, marriage coach or a family coach, a giftedness coach, a career or ministry coach, and what we call a life dream coach. And so for five days, we kind of go hammering tongs all the way from the family of origin issues and what I call the bad truth about the person, their brokenness, the things that have not worked out in their life and the wounds all the way to the good truth, which has to do more with the giftedness and God's purpose for them.
Bill Hendricks:
One of the things we do in looking at the family of origin is go back all the way into childhood and see it again and again and again, you're corroborating what we see there is people have been hurt and wounded just by the circumstances of life and things that have been done to them or things they've engaged in at these tender years of five and seven and 12 and 18 and so forth. But those things were never processed. Nobody helped them deal with, what does that really mean? What's that really about? And so they create a narrative and often those narratives are very filled with lies. The reason daddy went away was because I wasn't a good child, that sort of thing.
Bill Hendricks:
The reason that I was sexually abused is because I'm just a piece of trash. They then carry that narrative all the way into their conversion say in college. And then they get called to come to Dallas Seminary and prepare for what God has for them. They get into that. We're talking decades later, but the seeds of what was sewn there is now manifesting itself in inappropriate ways in relationships or in addictions and so forth. What you talk about when you talk about rewriting the identity, rewriting those narratives is absolutely what we see in that program. I feel certain you're seeing it before your eyes in the work that you're doing.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
Yeah. That sounds like a great program by the way. So hats off to you for the work that you're doing.
Bill Hendricks:
Well, thank you. Thank you. Another thing that struck me is, as you say, about what we believe about sex reveals what we believe about God. Put that together for me. I think I understand that but you guys have obviously done a lot more thinking about that.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
Yeah. I think another way that I put that is every sexual issue is also a spiritual issue, and understanding that these two are not compartmentalized. I think it goes both ways where the foundations of what we believe about God is going to come out in our beliefs about sexuality. For example, if we believe that God is the creator, if he's the definer of right and wrong and of truth, and he's a revealing God, then we look in scripture and we say, okay, we can discern a clear design for sex and for marriage in the scripture. That's a more compelling truth for me than what I might experience or feel or what the culture tells me.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
And so, as we see more progressive Christianity going away from those truths about God as creator, God is the one who defines morality, we see them changing their views on sexuality. We have to see that the change first came in how they view God. And as we rewrite our understanding of God, that's going to flow into every area of life, including what we think about marriage and divorce and sexuality. And so we believe that's really important that you have that conversation about who is God before you start arguing about your beliefs on sexuality. And so that's the first piece of it, Bill.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
But then the second piece I think is equally important, that our sexual experiences also inform what we believe about God. This is what we see happening so often in our culture today where people grow up in the church, they believe the Bible. And then they have a gay child who says, "I also believe in God but this is who I am and you have to love me. God loves me." That parent begins to go through something in psychology that we call cognitive dissonance. Now all of a sudden one plus one doesn't equal two. I have to look back at the scripture. I have to look back at what it means. Is God trustworthy? Does he love me?
Dr. Juli Slattery:
We see this happening not only over issues of LGBT, but let's say you experience sexual trauma. Where was God? If he's all loving and all powerful, why didn't he stop this? And so we believe a lot of the work of sexual discipleship is actually joining with people as they're experiencing that cognitive dissonance and revisiting if God is really who he says he is. And so, again, this is where we see that overlap of discipleship and sexuality, that every sexual issue is connected to deeper spiritual questions and issues that we want to get to. We don't have that conversation only on the sexual issue. We want to go to the deeper, more significant question and pain point.
Dr. Joy Skarka:
Yes. And with that, Juli, realizing how it takes time. For me, after I walked through that trauma, just sexual discipleship for me looked like going to Panera once a week with an older wiser woman of the faith and reading God's word together because I had never read his word to understand what God says about sexuality. So it was a whole process of relearning and figuring out, okay, what was just being said by my church but wasn't actual part of scripture? And so we take our leaders through a whole e-course on this on how to figure that out, how to get rid of what the world or maybe the church has historically said and figuring out, no, let's figure out what God says. We call that sexual discipleship.
Bill Hendricks:
That's excellent, because I think there's a bit of a caricature in our culture that the church is full of prudes and we don't talk about sex and we're actually against sex and God is mad because people are having sex with each other. And then in the culture, the pendulum sort of swung to where, oh, look, we're liberated and we have no shame around sex and we have sex with everybody all the time as we choose. It's a culture you said where people make sexual choices for themselves. Yet I meet people who are in that culture, I mean, that's their cultural sort of worldview if you will, and A, they don't strike me as happy. But if I engage them, it becomes very apparent they're not at all happy. They're actually, having tossed shame aside, something darker has come than shame. It's like a deadness inside.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
Yeah. Boy, it's so true. When we even look at the research, there was a study that just recently came out with Barna that was looking at loneliness, and loneliness is the highest at the youngest generations right now. And you can say, oh, that's because of the smartphone or the pandemic, and certainly those things play into that. But when you look at millennials, you look at Gen Z, they have rates of anxiety, depression, loneliness, suicidality that are just continuing to rise.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
I think a piece of this is that the prevailing message of the culture is that you were made for personal expression, you were made for sexual expression. Whereas what we see in scripture is actually you were made for intimacy and sexuality is a piece of how we express intimacy within the covenant of marriage. But as people pursue personal expression and autonomy at the sake of intimacy with God and with people, the fallout emotionally and psychologically is just going to be catastrophic and that's what we're beginning to see all throughout Western culture.
Bill Hendricks:
Authentic Intimacy really is, if I could use this word, you're in the healing business as it were. In other words, it's very much about restoring people souls if you will.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
For sure, yeah. I have no desire to talk about sex for the sake of talking about sex. I don't want to argue with people. I don't even want to argue with fellow Christians about what this Hebrew word means or Greek word means. Unfortunately, that's a lot of what's happening in these conversations. What we're really called to is how do we meet people in their pain and draw them to the feet of Jesus for healing, for restoration, and most importantly, to reconnect in their relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.
Bill Hendricks:
Well, and when I say healing, I'm really getting at this sense of restoration to wholeness. What I love about your work is that you're trying to put a positive dimension and vision for what sexuality can be for people. That, as you said, sexuality is not a problem to solve but a territory to reclaim, that it can be life giving for people.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
Yeah. I really believe that. We've seen it. At 10 years of ministry now, I just every now and then wake up and say, God, you're amazing because we so imperfectly articulate this. He keeps meeting us. And as you know, just in your work at Dallas Theological Seminary, when we faithfully live and teach the word of God, the Lord does great things. We need to apply that truth to sexuality and not be afraid but just to winsomely and courageously carry God's truth to people that are desperate for it.
Bill Hendricks:
Well, thank you so much for the work that you're doing. Juli Slattery, Joy Skarka, thank you for being a part of The Table today. This has really brought a lot of helpful not only information but resources to our listeners. I want to thank you for being a part of this.
Dr. Juli Slattery:
Thanks for having us. It's been a joy.
Dr. Joy Skarka:
Nice. Thank you, Bill. Good to see you.
Bill Hendricks:
Well, it's great to see you again and to meet you Juli. And again, their ministry is authenticintimacy.com. And if you're a leader, you also want to look at the sexualdiscipleship.com. I want to invite you to join us next time on The Table Podcast where we discuss issues of God and culture. I'm Bill Hendricks. Have a great day.
Speaker 1:
Thanks for listening to The Table Podcast. Dallas Theological Seminary; teach truth, love well.
About the Contributors
Bill Hendricks
Joy Skarka
Dr. Joy Skarka is passionate about creating spaces to free women from sexual shame. Joy is the Director of Discipleship for Authentic Intimacy and desires to reclaim God’s design for sexuality. She has a published chapter in Sanctified Sexuality: Valuing Sex in an Oversexed World and a published devotional e-book Freedom from Porn for Women. In 2021, she graduated with her Doctor in Educational Ministry from Dallas Theological Seminary, focusing on helping women find freedom from sexual shame. You can connect with Joy on Instagram @joyskarka.
Juli Slattery
Dr. Juli Slattery is a clinical psychologist, author, speaker and the president/co-founder of Authentic Intimacy. Juli earned her college degree at Wheaton College, an MA in psychology from Biola University, and an MS and a Doctorate degree in Clinical Psychology from Florida Institute of Technology.
From 2008-2012, Dr. Slattery served at Focus on the Family writing, teaching, and co-hosting the Focus on the Family Broadcast. In 2012, she left Focus on the Family to start Authentic Intimacy, a ministry devoted to reclaiming God’s design for sexuality. In 2020, Juli launched SexualDiscipleship.com, a platform designed to help Christian leaders navigate sexual issues and questions with gospel-centered truth.
Juli is the author of ten books and host of the weekly podcast “Java with Juli.” Juli and her husband Mike are the parents of 3 sons; they live in Akron, Ohio.